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Category Archives: race

Adventures in Stereotyping: People Who Should Know Better Edition

This week, I’ve been provoked into critiquing the casual ease with which people who, by all indications, ought to understand how to avoid stereotyping reproduce the reduction of groups people to the least common stereotype.

Now, I have myself been nailed for this. I wrote in a response paper for my Ethnic Studies 10AC course that “when I think Asian, I don’t think turban” as part of my discussion of the ways Indians get elided. And I was meaning this as a commentary on other people reducing Sikhs to turbans, but that wasn’t clear, and I got a very snarky comment in the margin from my TA. My fault for not being precise. Bad 17 year old me!

I want to distinguish the objects of my ire here from the Unintentionally Hilarious Figure  version of stereotyping, where people had actually found a pattern among groups of people but then just reported it without the necessary commentary or critique:

 

(I’m pretty sure this got from the Atlantic to me via @anetv  but Twitter’s extreme non-searchability precludes verifying. I’ll give her credit anyway.)

Instead, what I’m interested in is the ways that knowledgeable people, generating a name or an image, are using extremely loaded iconography that reproduces stereotypes when they don’t have to. They’re starting from scratch—with the acknowledgement that “scratch” is “the ideas already swirling around in culture around the objects they’re describing”—and yet they deploy these stereotyped ideas, seemingly without sufficient thinking-through.

This first came to my attention when I was forwarded a call for papers: From Veiling to Blogging: Women and Media in the Middle East. This was a goodly while ago now, but it sat there in my inbox until quite recently. The subject is not my area of expertise, so I wasn’t going to submit and should probably have just deleted it. But every time I came to it, I just got mad and tempted to fire off a reply to the listserv about it. I didn’t, because I burn enough bridges on a day-to-day basis without resorting to nuclear tactics, but it was really frustrating.

What was particularly problematic about it was that the people doing the special issue should have known better. The general public discourse around this may well be still about “white people saving brown women from brown men”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak specified men doing the saving in the case of sati, but the way some feminists have picked up the veil and run with it makes it an equal opportunity formula—but academics should really know better, because “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is as old as I am.

And indeed the organizers did, in fact, know better, because the actual text of the CFP started out by framing the special issue as a critique of precisely the way that “Middle Eastern women have traditionally been viewed as weak and submissive, passively accepting male authority and leadership rather than seeking to be a leader in their own right” as well as how “women of the Middle East have been portrayed as helpless creatures who are often hidden behind the veil, quietly waiting to be liberated.”

It’s therefore baffling to me why on earth they’d frame the topic as “from veiling to blogging.” Why imply that’s a chronological shift in “women and media in the Middle East” rather than (as they probably intended) in the thinking on women and media in that region? Why redeploy the veil at all, given the enormous risks of re-instantiating the very discourse they’re attempting to dispute?

The second entry in the “wow, you didn’t think that through” file, and the one that solidified my determination to write this blog post, comes from reading the article Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes, which I got from @mikemonello

So there I am, scrolling down, not finding the geometric shapes particularly illuminating—the black and white X for Nihilism, sure, but many of the other Venn diagram-looking ones didn’t strike me as the “surprisingly simple and accessible package” the article’s introduction had promised—when I get to Hedonism and come to a screeching halt.

 

Really? A pink triangle for Hedonism? What decade is this that we’re still reinforcing the idea that gay sex is about irresponsible pleasure-seeking and gay folks have a worldview in which, as the poster-makers describe Hedonism, “Pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Actions can be evaluated in terms of how much pleasure they produce”?  I mean, yes, clearly that’s the world Rick Santorum and other far-right ideologues live in, but the rest of us get that homos are no more or less irresponsible in their pleasure-seeking than anyone else.

If these are people who have enough grasp on philosophy to make posters summarizing it, they should be no strangers to sophisticated thinking. And they should therefore have enough intelligence and sense of the world to think of something considerably less reductive. Like the veiling example, some people may not know better, but these people should.

And I guess that’s the issue. How will the general public know any better if we who do aren’t more careful in how we communicate, to each other (the CFP) and to people in general (the posters)?

Hack This Post! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice

This week’s post is a recap of an event in which I participated on Monday, April 2. It’s housed over at the blog of the organization that hosted the event, the venerable Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois.

So please do head over there and check it out: Hack This Post! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice

 

Of Hate Crimes, Livable Lives, and Taking a Stand

On Wednesday, December 6, 2012, at 5:44am, a white guy leapt on a South Asian man in the train station in Champaign, IL, shouting something about this being his (the white guy’s) country—exact verbiage hasn’t been clear.

The white guy, identified by local news outlet the News-Gazette as 23-year-old Joshua Scaggs of Fithian, IL, then proceeded to choke the non-white guy, identified as University of Illinois law professor Dhammika Dharmapala, and cut him with a utility knife, opening a “six-inch cut on his throat which bled profusely.”

Scaggs was arrested for a hate crime, but ultimately charged with “attempted murder and two counts of aggravated battery”; the prosecuting attorney “opted not to file it [the hate crime charge] because the other charges carry heavier penalties and he’s confident he can prove the aggravated battery based on the information he has.”

Clearly, the hate crime law is not written in a useful way here. It’s not an add-on that increases the severity of any crime, but a separate charge. Somewhere, in an article I can’t find now, somebody involved on the prosecutorial side of this said that usually the hate crime gets prosecuted with misdemeanors like vandalism or theft, indicating that the penalty attached to a hate crime is worse than that but less than aggravated battery.

This was surprising to me, because I feel like most hate crime laws are written as the tack-on variety—”Now, with 15% more sentencing!” And, I don’t know how I feel about that.

I mean, on one hand, the things one is doing while committing a hate crime are generally already illegal. And, as the prosecutor noted in the quote above, it’s often hard to prove intent enough to get a conviction.

Therefore, I’m not totally on board with hate crime legislation. I certainly don’t think that attempts to put it on the books should be the be-all and end-all of activism (you hear me, LGBT nonprofits?), not least because I’m wary of constructing such positions as inherently, unlivably vulnerable to violence in the process.

Though of course, this case seems pretty clear cut. It’s quite evident that “this is my country” meant “it’s not yours” or “you don’t belong here”—and that it was racially motivated. Dhammapala was visibly different from Scaggs’ idea of “his country.” It’s not plain xenophobia, that is, because a German-born person, say, wouldn’t have produced that same visual trigger. And neither would a person of African descent, whether first generation or eighteenth (Slavery in America estimates 12 generations from the first Africans to the end of slavery; Racematters.org says there have been 6 generations since).

So, even though a racist imaginary would think of the default “American” as white, it would also readily identify a black person as American in a way that East Asians, South Asians, Arabs, and Latinos don’t get—as my Asian-American friends who get drunk fratboys ching-chong-ing in their faces or assuming they don’t speak English can attest. So, race is more complex than the usual American reduction to black and white, but it’s still pretty relevant and this was still an attack motivated by racial hatred.

Moreover, the fact that juries apparently don’t buy it when prosecutors argue that crimes were prejudice-based deserves critique as an instance where attempts to redress structural inequalities become figured as “special rights.”

This, then, brings me to the other hand, which is that it is structural inequality that makes hate crime possible. Some people are seen as less important, less worthy, and indeed less human than others, and—when you get somebody crazy enough—members of certain groups make more cultural sense as targets. Given that, a structural solution seems reasonable.

That is, though I’m not sure anyone has ever shown that increased hate-crime penalties serve as a deterrent for people who for whatever reason translate social devaluation into a hunting license, it does make a statement that, as a society, we don’t find such hunting acceptable.

In this way, hate-crime legislation, simply by existing, perhaps lessens the devaluation that starts the cycle. The challenge, then, is to prevent that devaluation from being replaced by a pervasive, uninhabitably-terror-inducing sense of vulnerability. We also have to not let the framing of a group in the law as not-attackable be framed as “special rights” rather than as a corrective to actual special rights already enjoyed by other groups.

And we certainly have to contest the response to such incidents in platitudes—the email from University of Illinois President Michael Hogan to the so-called campus community ways called for a renewal of “our commitment to tolerance” and requested that “we all take a moment to remember that compassion is our greatest virtue and that we are united together in a wish for healing and understanding in the wake of such a tragic incident.”

This is real. This is serious. It demands more of a response than this. “We,” whoever we are, are quite evidently not “united” and don’t have “understanding.” It’s not an” incident” but the product of a system. And don’t even get me started on the implicit superiority of the tolerate-r over the tolerate-d (because I know I go on about it all the time; just check out Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion).

With vapid and condescending responses like this, hate crime laws start to look better and better.

Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment, Or: Why we Still need Intersectionality

Reports that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexually harassing some women in the mid-1990s, accusations that were settled out of court at the time, have been at the top of Google News for at least a week now.

The headline slid down a little when Andy Rooney died and to make way for election results, but never “below the fold,” not least because the number of women allegedly harassed has continued to grow—four at last count. This has seemingly become the only story in the 2012 campaign.

My first instinct is to be sick to death of sex scandals. Far too often (and ever doing it is too much for me) people’s fitness to hold office is assessed on the basis of having sex other people disapprove of. I get annoyed when substantive issues get shoved aside in favor of tabloid-esque coverage.

Of course, it’s not a greatfirst instinct, since that’s not what’s going on here, as sexual harassment is categorically different from an affair or sexting or gay sex with consensual adult partners—the things other politicians have found to end their careers.

Indeed, some of the coverage, in particular one opinion piece that got me fired up enough to write this blog in the first place, shows why, as much as it shouldn’t be the only story, the accusations against Cain should be a story. Joe Klein of Time argues that “fleeting moments of human frailty, especially of the testosterone-addled kind, are inevitable and should remain private, absent extenuating circumstances (like physical assault). I’m generally opposed to the press setting moral standards that most of us can’t meet”

No, no. No no no. Just, no.

Assuming you have a right of access to other people’s bodies is not “human frailty,” nor is it “inevitable.” Nor is refraining from doing so a “moral standard” that anyone should have trouble meeting as much as what’s required by basic human decency. Having testosterone, however much it might “addle” you, does not give you a free pass. Physical assault is not the only kind of inappropriate behavior for which one should be called out, and keeping abuses of power private does little to discourage them.

Klein adds, “Yes, sexual harassment is different from general poking around since it is a form of aggressive behavior–but it is also more difficult to prove (although the two women in question received cash settlements from the Restaurant Association, which means that we’re probably dealing with some form of industrial-strength obnoxiousness here).”

Seriously, you’re going to defend something you call “general poking around” as not a form of aggressive behavior? See above re: assumption of a right of access.

That’s before we even get to the echo of the old assumption that women tend to make up sexual assault, and the fact that Klein contains this with the mention that there were settlements and “industrial-strength obnoxiousness” doesn’t make up for that suggestion. Yes, of course women might say this happened even if it’s not true, because they are treated so well when they come forward and being violated is so easy to talk about.

All of this points to why it’s vital that this conversation be had, not just with Cain, but with any case where there’s this sort of question of coercion or hostile work environment or power differential. First, if people hear this often enough, they’ll get the idea that it’s not an acceptable way to behave. And second, if it’s true, it’s something people have a right to know before they go electing someone to the highest office in the land.

Because yes, I’ll come out and argue that if Cain is, in fact, a harasser he’s not fit to run the country. Importantly, again, it’s not just because there’s a sex scandal—I am a firm believer in the fact that any kind of sex anybody wants to have with other consenting adults is perfectly acceptable even if I personally find it revolting.

But there aren’t consenting adults here; what makes a sexual harasser unfit for duty is the abuse of power it represents. That’s where the problem lies. That’s why that person shouldn’t be given any more power and should possibly lose the position they had that they decided to abuse in the first place.

Of course, it is totally reasonable to argue against the way in which the news has come to focus on this to the exclusion of all other topics. As Klein points out, “there is far more important business–like Herman’s Cain prohibitive lack of knowledge about almost every relevant issue–to be discussed.” There needs to be more substantive debate about Cain—and someone needs to remember that there are other candidates, two or three of them still serious contenders.

But then there’s the elephant in the room (har, har). This sexual harassment case isn’t just an issue of gender (which isn’t to imply that it ever is, but it sometimes gets treated as such); it’s also bound up in issues of race.

“The notion of black man as sexual predator is a particularly toxic stereotype–and it may intensify the self-righteous satisfaction some Republicans are getting from supporting a conservative black man for President. As in: those liberals pretend to be pro-black, but every time a Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain comes down the pike, they throw sex at him.”

On one hand, I’m deeply uneasy with the ways in which that “toxic stereotype” probably has a whole lot more to do with the wall-to-wall coverage of this Cain story than the journalists and readers want to admit. The story makes sense to run and catches people’s attention because it meshes with this idea.

There is something deeply worrisome about this being the basis on which African-American republicans are undermined. That’s a reason to resist the frenzy—though as stated above I don’t think there’s any reason not to talk about the issue altogether.

On the other hand, there’s a problem when race and gender get pitted against each other like this. Thinking back to Clarence Thomas—an obvious precedent—there was this weird thing where somehow Anita Hill had to either have solidarity with (implicitly white) feminists and call out Thomas’s misconduct or have solidarity with African-Americans and keep quiet so that there could be a black Supreme Court justice.

Here again, there’s some implicit demand to either not critique Cain—what the right is implicitly saying “liberals” ought to do if they are really “pro-black”—or be take a stand against sexual harassment if one is really“pro-woman.”

The problem is that, as many an intersectional theorist and woman of color feminist has argued, you can’t separate out those things. You’re not black plus a woman, so it’s not one or the other. It’s also not one or the other in critiquing the behavior of such an African-American man.

The weight of history makes this tricky to navigate: the “myth of the black rapist” relies on the assumption of black men as less civilized, less controlled, and having outsized sexual urges, and I know that this is bound up, to greater or lesser extent, with the Herman Cain Sexual Harassment Extravaganza of 2011. I don’t want to perpetuate the myth even as I say Cain’s not fit to lead if the accusations are true.

We have to call out the racist logics that make this a “good” story—i.e. exciting—even as we insist that it is still an important story. A pretty tall order, but I think it’s possible.

Fandom and the Myth of Oppressed People Points

Tagging the archive of entries made me realize I have a lot fewer blogs about fandom—you know, my primary academic interest—than just about anything else. Now, the fact that I often blog on the basis of current events that catch my attention (next week, Herman Cain and sexual harassment) has something to do with this, of course, but it’s still an unfortunate situation.

And then, just as I was thinking this and wracking my brains for something not only timely but interesting to say about fans, a fan-related blog topic fell into my lap. And that would be awesome if it weren’t for what it was.

To start, I love fans. I am a fan. I’m totally aware that fans are often misrepresented through a focus on the fan practices that are most nonnormative in relation to non-fan culture, and it makes me want to protect them. But sometimes fans do something awful and indefensible—and, in this case, racist—and it makes me feel terrible but I have to call them out on it.

One of the posters, via Dispatch.com

It all started when I saw something about the “We’re a culture, not a costume” project. I feel like it was on Twitter, but I can’t find it now so maybe I saw it on Google News. (If I got it from you, tell me so I can give you credit!)

In this campaign, the Students Teaching Against Racism in Society (STARS) organization at Ohio University produced a series of posters urging people to rethink their Halloween costume choices. Each had a student who’s a member of a particular racial or ethnic group holding up a picture of a Halloween costume that purports to allow people to pretend to be a member of that group.

Predictably, we see Asian woman = geisha, Middle Eastern or Muslim man = terrorist, and a “gangsta” white girl in blackface (or black-body, as all of her visible skin is brown-ed). The captions say, “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”

Bonus: @BobbyBigWheel made a handy flowchart to help you decide whether to wear blackface on Halloween (via the ever-fabulous @Halfrican_One)

The STARS campaign is a really powerful statement about the harm done by stereotyping and reducing an entire group of people to the most offensive denominator. (There is, a typo showed me, revealing wordplay in there somewhere about demon-inator.) I think one of these posters should be made and distributed at my campus to jolt the student body out of their largely unreflexive support of the retired Chief Illiniwek mascot.

And then, some science fiction fans turned around and made a “This is not who I am and this is not okay” poster showing a Dr. Who dalek and some women dressed as “sexy daleks.”

To suggest that “misrepresenting” a fictitious species of villains is equivalent to misrepresenting an actual group that has materially suffered as a result of white supremacy, as tumblr user tarynaria notes, “undermines the impact of the original campaign: namely pointing out racist Halloween costumes (or costume party costumes) as racist.”

She adds, “it’s rude and disrespectful to those involved in the campaign,” because to make this joke is to “tell them that their voices don’t matter.”This poster, as a response to the STARS set, indicates that its maker doesn’t care about the message the original was trying to get across. It frames the racism of the costumes as either as trivial or as made up by people who are overly sensitive.

(Also, bonus awfulness points for reinforcing the idea that women’s science fiction costuming is always insincere or “pandering” and attempting to be sexy. I don’t think the these things are unrelated.)

Implying that racism is trivial or a product of excessive sensitivity are classic tactics of white dismissal of race as a relevant category. They’re even on the Fantasy and Science Fiction Bingo, No Racism in Fiction edition card! And the fact that this poster as a response to an important argument about racism in costuming made sense not only to produce but to reblog across fandom (it got to me via a tweet by a scifi fan) makes the assumption of default whiteness within fandom glaring.

This, of course, is at odds with the way that fandom is frequently characterized as a space where the culturally downtrodden can make media work for them. Though there have certainly been critiques of the argument and attempts to nuance it, mostly what we hear is that fandom is resistant to norms. Fans are the heroic underdog rebels struggling against the Evil Corporate Empire.

And there’s a certain amount of truth to this. Fans are actually perpetually under threat of legal challenge from corporate media capital.

In addition, the fans who engage in the kind of fandom most often noticed in fan studies are mostly women. Fairly often (at least, out of proportion with the rest of the population), they’re queer, either in the sense of having same-sex desire or by breaking norms of sexuality more generally. Fans do absolutely resist and rework norms of gender and sexuality from a subordinate position in the schema of normativity.

In these ways, yes, fans are underdogs and resistant and available to champion. The problem comes when we have an insufficiently intersectional understanding of what constitutes oppression. Yes, fans are downtrodden in some ways, but that doesn’t excuse them from treading on others by other criteria.

That is, if Glee creator Ryan Murphy has a case of Gay White Man Syndrome, lots of fans and fan scholars have White Fan Syndrome, and we need to call it out.

Here’s where the Myth of Oppressed People Points comes in. There’s a pervasive sense that if a person is her- or himself oppressed in any way, they get a pass for oppressing others. As I put it when discussing Glee, this is like saying “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against as a woman because I’m gay” or “I can’t be racist, I’m gay!”

Those statements are patently absurd, but so is it absurd to claim “I can’t be racist, I’m downtrodden as a fan!” Because clearly people can.

There’s fairly widespread awareness and critique of the default maleness of fandom in the popular and industrial imaginary and the ways in which that’s exclusionary for women. I raised it in my blog about Comic-Con 2011’s “Sexy Geek” Panel. Suzanne Scott pointed it out when blogging about that incident before me as well as in her excellent dissertation Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation (especially the conclusion).

You can also see this in Henry Jenkins‘s discussion of fan viding vs. fan films in Convergence Culture and in Julie Levin Russo‘s careful articulation of the specificity of femslash fandom in her Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities. The point (besides a chance to show off that I’ve been reading a lot lately), is that people get that gender is a factor in fandom.

However, race has not received anything like the same attention. I actually had to put down a fan studies article recently lest I fling it across the room because it so totally ignored the obvious role race played in the phenomenon it was discussing.

In fact, so far the only academic attention to this that I’ve seen is a 2009 Symposium section in Transformative Works and Cultures called Pattern Recognition: A Dialogue on Racism in Fan Communities, though I know that there’s a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on Race and Ethnicity in Fandom coming out later this month because I’m published in it.

The dalek poster reemphasizes why this work is necessary. We can love fans and celebrate the way that they are resistant, sure. What we can’t do is get so caught up in our love and our underdog narrative that we can’t see when they aren’t so lovable or downtrodden. It’s our responsibility to critique fan practices when that’s necessary. There are no Oppressed People Points, just intersecting systems of privilege.